A back-channel comment from a blogger out in my old stomping grounds of the Bay Area made me sit up straight:

 

One thing that’s been really striking is discovering that for many younger poets, you are “Silliman’s Blog”; while they’re familiar with you in that role, they are often not familiar with your work, having only a general sense of you as an “elder” or as representing “language poetry” (understood as an institutionalized orthodoxy).

 

Big sigh. Permit me to suggest that readers might start here. The bibliography has over 700 items & one could literally start anywhere, even with Wet: The Journal of Gourmet Bathing, which once published an excerpt from Sunset Debris.

 

But, seriously, the problem of younger poets in particular lacking much sense of recent literary history is one of those unending tasks every writer confronts. When I taught my seminar in the graduate writing program at San Francisco State back in 1981, I had as good a class as a poet/teacher could want – Susan Gevirtz, Cole Swenson, Jerry Estrin, Terry Ehret, Margaret Johnson were all participants. At the first session of the class, I passed out a list of book titles & a second list of poets and asked the group to match the books with their poets. This wasn’t an obscure list – it had Plath’s Ariel & Dorn’s Gunslinger, volumes by Ginsberg, Levertov, Creeley, Ashbery & the like. Not a single student was able to match even 20 percent of the poets to their books.

 

My own experience at the Berkeley Poetry Conference some 16 years earlier reflects that same circumstance, except that I knew even less at the time. I had opportunities to see Spicer, even Olson, but didn’t know enough to understand that they were opportunities. Spicer only lived a few weeks beyond the conference. While Olson lived another five years, I believe he only gave one other reading in the Bay Area after that. I missed that one too. In retrospect, I feel extraordinarily fortunate to have seen writers like Lew Welch & Paul Blackburn, poets who died far too young, & who were heard by far too few in their lifetimes.*

 

In this blog, I’ve generally focused on writing from the 1940s to the present (or maybe the near future). While I myself didn’t awaken to poetry really until the 1960s, the writers who were then defining the literary landscape were themselves still actively engaged with the writers & issues of the 1950s & ‘40s, so all those elements were very active still. For example, I think that one could draw a reasonably coherent line from the poetry of Robert Duncan in the 1940s to the Canadian Louis Dudek & the New Zealand poet Allen Curnow – all three come out of a writing in which, say, both Yeats & modernism are active influences. After the impact of Olson & Creeley in the 1950s, however, Duncan spins off in another direction, as different from Olson & Creeley as it was from Dudek & Curnow. How & why & what the implications of this might be for reading the various poetries of all three nations matter – to me, at least.

 

The forty years between then & now have seen a bewildering array of different threads & strands mixing together, unraveling & often going in directions that seemed unimaginable up until the very moment when somebody did, in fact, imagine it. I can recall, for example, the first time I saw Judy Grahn’s  Edward the Dyke and Other Poems, the satire struck me as overwhelmed into artlessness by the rawness of the pain it reflected. Today, I read that work totally differently & see Grahn’s early writing as literally inventing its audience through the most careful acts of craft conceivable, confident that if she writes it, they will show up. One seldom sees Grahn mentioned in histories of langpo or more broadly within postmodern writing, yet Kathy Acker’s self-publication of her first novels, chapter by chapter, just putting the work out there without regard to the fact that there was “no place” at the time for anything even remotely like her writing could not have occurred in a world in which Grahn’s poetry did not already exist. Acker in turn had an enormous impact on language writing, even if she herself always tended to keep it at arm’s length. Nothing that Barrett Watten nor Bruce Andrews nor Bob Grenier nor I was going to do was apt to push the boundaries of our art form any further than Acker’s work did hers. In a decade in which Tom Marioni could throw a coil of metal tape in the air and call it a one-second sculpture, writers as diverse as Grahn & Acker demonstrated the various ways in which writing also might go forward, making it patently clear just what antiquarian hokum the old – as well as the new – formalism truly was.

 

But such linkages aren’t always obvious and context matters. If you want to read Jack Spicer, you at some point need to know not only the work of Robert Duncan & Robin Blaser, but also Joanne Kyger, George Stanley & Harold Dull. Writers who have long since stopped publishing, such as Ebbe Borregaard, as well as others who did not begin to publish until later & at a considerable remove from, say, the Spicer Circle, such as Larry Fagin, also need to be factored into the equation. This is, as Spicer himself would have recognized, a cartography of poetics. Tracing such routes is not just good discipline, it’s a lot of fun. Rereading George Stanley’s work over the past year has been some of the most enjoyable time I’ve spent with poetry in ages. There is also both pleasure & information to be taken by constructing imaginary lineages, such as one Annie Finch & I have concocted that runs Sara Teasdale → Helen Adam → Lee Ann Brown.

 

One question is always how far back does one need to go. For the blog, I’ve generally drawn the line at the 1940s, although there are a few writers – Pound, Williams, Stein, Zukofsky, possibly some of the other Objectivists – who could cause me to go back a little further. But reading, say, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ marvelous essay in Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry: 1908-1934, on the Hoos of Hooville, specifically the use of that nonword “hoo” by Lindsay, Stevens & Eliot in various poems, constructing whiteness – DuPlessis borrows the term “blanchitude” – out of their own depictions of an Other, I realize that to even approach this sort of topic I would have to construct a mental configuration of a world in which Vachel Lindsay is not déjà toujours a joke. & even if I could do so intellectually, I can’t get there emotionally – it never feels right.

 

While I enjoy older literatures – my kids have heard me reading Chaucer in Middle English & I sometimes listen to a tape by J.B. Bessinger, Jr. reading  Beowulf & other Old English texts in the original, a wonderful antidote to Heaney’s reduction of that text to Bad Sports Writing of the Gods or whatever he imagines it to be – my own sense of the importance of completely reconstructing those prior periods is that it recedes with each preceding generation. Conversely, the process of emasculation that occurs whenever one takes a work out of its historical context – the inherent problem with Straussian approaches to education – becomes even more acute as one approaches the present. Thus while it may not be more important in the larger scheme of things to understand the impact of Richard Duerden than it is Keats, the failure to do so can have consequences that are just as serious, perhaps more so. On one level, I plan to keep blogging until I understand all the ways in which Alexander Pope → Adelaide Crapsey → Talan Memmott make sense. On another, it’s that latter connection that matters most.

 

There are of course poets in any generation who seem to do their work with no sense of the larger parameters of literary context – and some of these folks do interesting & valuable work. But in fact most people don’t seem to work that way – at some point, the Cole Swensons, Jerry Estrins & Susan Gevirtz’ of any given group of promising & talented young writers seem to make a decision to take responsibility for understanding where & how they fit into the larger scheme of things, which entails gaining a far better sense of what their own personal map of traditions & influences might be. Indeed, that decision seems to play a significant role in the transformation into a “successful” poet. It’s a commitment, among other things, to some hard (albeit pleasurable) work.**

 

If I am my blog, and perhaps I am, it is because, for some readers, this is the easiest way to make contact with my writing. These bite-size pieces are nowhere nearly as forbidding as the 79 page paragraph that concludes the new edition of Tjanting. Nor do you have to be anywhere near a bookstore to access it. On occasion, this blog might have the added advantage of being about you. All are incentives to turn here first. Yet the poets of the next generation – and the one after that – who will get to define how all of this makes sense, will almost always be the ones who go out & do the work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* I even got to hear Lew Welch do some of his “Motown” version of The Waste Land in that silky smooth tenor of his.

 

** Interestingly, neither of the two women in my class back in 1981 who struck me at the time as being “the most talented” of the writers there seems to be producing poetry now, or – if they are – at least not at all publicly. One, last I heard, was becoming a school teacher; the other appears to be a full-time member of a Buddhist residential community in upstate New York. As I’ve suggested here before, brilliance can be disempowering – the poets who feel that they need to work harder are the ones who ultimately do best.